Paying Respect at the Lynching Memorial

Updated: Jul 17, 2019

The America the Bountiful tour had a very heavy day today (June 10th). We visited the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. It’s the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people and people terrorized by lynching. For inspiration check out the photo of a quote by Mya Angelou below.

Set on a six-acre site, the memorial uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror. The site includes a memorial square with 800 six-foot monuments to symbolize thousands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States and the counties and states where this terrorism took place.

The memorial structure on the center of the site is constructed of over 800 corten steel monuments, one for each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching took place. The names of the lynching victims are engraved on the columns. The memorial is more than a static monument. In the six-acre park surrounding the memorial is a field of identical monuments, waiting to be claimed and installed in the counties they represent. Over time, the national memorial will serve as a report on which parts of the country have confronted the truth of this terror and which have not.